We are not secondary citizens!

Monday, 8 June 2015

On July 11th the Budapest Pride March will go from downtown through world heritage environment. The aim of the event is to raise awareness about the everyday discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people in Hungary, and to call attention to the harm that homophobic and transphobic political discourse causes.

Everybody joining the Budapest Pride March on July 11th can expect to take part in a provocative event. Our aim is to provoke and achieve that homophobic and transphobic statements made by the prime minister of the country, the mayor of Budapest and other political elite do not go without consequences. Our aim is to provoke and have a liberated, cordon free March, which has been present for 20 years and now involves several thousand people. We want to provoke leading politicians not to say that the several hundred thousand LGBTQ people living in Hungary are not worthy of the world heritage environment of Budapest. And we claim provocatively that it is utterly distressing that in 2015 Hungarian public discourse considers a demonstration for human rights and the equality of LGBTQ people as provocative.

We believe it is outrageous that Józsefváros mayor, Máté Kocsis, and mayor of Budapest, István Tarlós publicly said recently that the Budapest Pride March should not take place in a historic, world heritage environment, thus clearly treating thousands of March participants and hundreds of thousands of LGBTQ people as secondary citizens.

We welcome everyone to join us on July 11th for the Budapest Pride March who wants to stand up for the rights of the LGBTQ community. Together we can show that LGBTQ people living in Hungary and their allies have the right to demonstrate and celebrate freely, expressing their true selves even in a world heritage environment.